Abstract

This dissertation is concerned with themes the author argues must be of interest in a skeptical and disintegrative age: whether we are personally responsible for our actions, and whether morality has any ultimate vindication. The argument is presented in the form of a dialogue between two radically opposed kinds of skeptics, one of whom is so overcome with the passion to find the "first causes of all things" that he believes nothing he sees with his own eyes, while the other, whose passion is analysis, phlegmatically believes nothing except what he sees with his own eyes. Their conversation moves from "assent to assent" rather than from proof to proof; a corollary of the accumulation of "assents" is that their personalities also slowly shift. By the end of the dialogue their focus has moved from individual to social themes, and in the meantime they have begun to pass "through" their skepticism. Their conversation culminates in an agenda for the reconstruction of moral and political theory, the principal influences upon which are Aristotle and Nietzsche